Jul 19, 2008

I have been meaning to blog about Tor for a while now, but I keep pushing it off. I really wanted to write about it when I was getting into it with Ironkey a few months back. One of the things Ironkey offers, besides an encrypted USB stick, is a secure web browser for anonymous web browsing.

Well, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.EFF.org) has developed a free tool to protect your anonymity on the internet called Tor, which stands for The Onion Router. Tor currently works on all platforms including Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac. If you use Firefox, there is a Torbutton extension to make surfing with Tor even easier.

This is what the Tor Project has to say:

Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

I found this video on Howcast from the boys over at Hak.5 explaining a little bit more about Tor:

Do you use Tor for secure web surfing? Care to chat about your experience with it in the comments?